


This is Why We Fight

by eudaimon



Category: Hunger Games Trilogy - Suzanne Collins
Genre: F/M, Post canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-12-21
Updated: 2010-12-21
Packaged: 2017-10-13 22:52:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,335
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/142600
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eudaimon/pseuds/eudaimon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Some days, it feels like everything left in the world must be an echo.  With his children learning about the Games in school, Peeta has to decide what stories he will tell and what stories he will keep to himself.</p>
            </blockquote>





	This is Why We Fight

**Author's Note:**

  * For [withoutmaps](https://archiveofourown.org/users/withoutmaps/gifts).



> I loved writing this - I hope that you enjoy it. Merry Christmas <3

_And when we die, we will die with our arms unbound.  
This is why.  
This is why we fight._  
\- The Decemberists.

 

Some days it feels like everything left in the world must be an echo. He stands and watches his children go racing across the meadow, sending the seeds up towards the blue sky. Helicopters, they call them. He remembers whirring rotors, the noise, and then he closes his eyes and opens them and looks at her, standing there with her hair blowing across her face in the light Spring breeze.

It's been nearly twenty years since they walked away from the Capitol wearing borrowed skin.

Their daughter is nearly six, her dark hair flying out when she turns, dancing complicated steps entirely of her own design. Sometimes, he's grateful that she has blue eyes, his eyes. Sometimes, when Gale comes from District 2 wearing battered boots and a bag on his shoulder and he bends and lifts the boy, it feels like the whole world has grey eyes and he sticks out like a sore thumb in his own home.

But she has his eyes which means that some part of him will survive in the world after he's gone.  
He thinks of Finnick Odair's son, whose eyes are the green of a glass calm ocean.

It matters: what's left and what continues. His daughter is named five times for five memories but, somewhat predictably, they tend to call her 'Prim'.

He sits in the lounge and listens to Katniss bathing Finn, talking to him in a low voice. She never really got the hang of telling good stories; she talks to him like a tiny adult, and he babbles back. Katniss talks to their son and Peeta sits with their daughter. She rests her head against his ribcage and he separates out the strands of her dark hair. Katniss' hair was never smooth again after the fire, after both of them had the fine things about them burned away and only the useful things were left.

His little girl is soft and unwounded and, if he can help it, she'll never know fear.

“What was it like, Daddy?” she asks him.  
It's a question that she's asked before.

They have lived long enough to become history; his children are being taught about the Games in school. His daughter is clever enough to know that her parents had something to do with it, with the Games and with what came after. They show images of the Mockingjay. They talk about the resistance.

On an enamelled tray in their bedroom, a golden pin, shaped like a mockingjay in flight. A book bound in leather on a high shelf.

A long time ago, they had to decide what kind of stories they were going to tell their children and how much they were going to pass on. They'd made the mistake of thinking that District 12 was over, that I could never come back; they'd forgotten how quickly flowers can grow in Spring.

Katniss has a book that, one day, she says she'll use to teach the children about the world. He paints the flowers for her, the animals.

There is another book.

What they learned, when they were young together is how fragile even strong people are. How easy it is to end a life; how simple to make a ghost. Some of the people that they loved are dead, some of them are still alive but just as surely gone.

He's written it all down. He's painted them. He's done his best to get a good likeness.

And, one day, they'll be the stories that he tells.

He's spent a long time deciding on the things that he'll tell and the things that he'll keep secret forever. The things that aren't his to tell, but his ghosts are always with him.

She doesn't even realise what she's asking.

One day, she's telling him an involved story about the cleverest girl in her class at school which leads to a story about Johanna Mason, cleverest girl that he ever met who won by playing stupid, who looked beautiful with her face framed in leaves, but he'll never tell her about how she was always afraid of water and he'll never say how broken they were together.

Johanna comes back to mind when he's standing up to his waist in warm water supporting her belly while she kicks and flails; he'll go no deeper but he tells her about Finnick Odair who could swim like a fish, who was strong and beautiful. He keeps what the Capitol made of that. He tells her that Finiick never gave up and he makes it into a lesson about perseverance not resilience.

He tells her that Finnick and Annie's son learned to swim before he could walk.  
It doesn't matter if she takes a little longer.

Standing outside her bedroom with a drink in his hand, he thinks of Haymitch, the promises he made and the promises that he kept, but now how hard he was and how done with it all he was.

When she's spinning in a new dress, he tells her everything that he can remember about Cinna, who was probably braver than all of them put together. It was Cinna's doing, really – he was the one that made Katniss into the Mockingjay, in the end. He tells her about Katniss Everdeen, the Girl who was on fire, and how that was Cinna's dream. He tells her how much they miss him.

(He tells her nothing about Rue and Katniss doesn't talk about her either but, sometimes, when she thinks that Peeta's not listening, she sings. It's always the same song).

And then there's Gale, who comes and goes. Peeta tried very hard to dislike Gale but he never really could because there's something so solid and so straight about him and it's difficult to argue with how much he always loved Katniss. He comes to visit with mud from District 2 drying on his boots and he plays chase with the children in the meadow and then they lie down, breathless, and Gale tells their daughter what it was like waiting for people to come home. Inevitably, Gale goes back to his job in District 2 and she is left bursting with questions, and Peeta answers the ones that he can. Yes, Katniss has known Gale for a long time. Yes, Gale is a good man. Yes, he's an a brilliant archer. No, he's not quite as good a shot as Katniss.

She loves Uncle Gale desperately, so he never talks to her about the bomb and why there's no Aunt Prim to visit as well.

More often that not, Prim falls asleep while Katniss is bathing Finn and Peeta carries her to bed. He's sure-footed on the stairs. It's years and years since he last limped.

Down the hall, Katniss is singing.  
Peeta bends over his daughter and kisses her forehead and hums along.

*

She sleeps on her side, curled in tight like a seed. He sits awake, distracted by an itch in a leg that's years gone. He flexes the toes on his good foot. In the dark, none of the scars are visible but he reaches out with one hand against her bare shoulder and reads her like a map.

There are stories that he is never going to tell his children, not because he's ashamed of them but because they're not his to tell.

Quiet moments between them. A handful of berries. Dead presidents. A brain full of clouds. Torture and hatred and loss. The shock of bomb-blast. A shot that wasn't taken and one that was. How they walked away from the arena not once but twice and what they left behind.

Better to tell the story of how there were thirteen districts all along but how twelve was always home and how the flowers grow quicker in the spring time. And how they're happy here.

Real or not real?


End file.
